The Third Imperative of Executive Effectiveness - Leading Learning

Concluding article from the series written by Ron Wilder:

In this fourth article of a four part series, I'll focus on the necessity of leading learning within your organization.

As the leader of the business, you must help people learn the new behaviors that are required for success. It is not enough to devise a new business model or maintain a tight focus on execution. Even when the organization enthusiastically supports innovation in the business model, the people in the organization still need structure, support and time to adopt the new right behaviors. Recognizing and planning for these needs up front can greatly reduce your risks and can actually accelerate your transition to a new business model.

Consider this example. A non-profit arts organization was highly regarded as a leader in its community and was growing in stature nationally. They were quite successful as far as arts organizations go. The senior leadership aspired to a much bigger vision of bringing music to a larger and wider audience. They recruited an acclaimed artistic director and their performance quality was increasing. The organization was financially stable with a solid budget.

However, their approach to customers was still based on the traditional model followed by the vast majority of arts organizations. A marketing group was responsible for ticket sales or earned-income. A development group was responsible for generating philanthropic gifts, or contributed income.

This approach created some aggravating annoyances for customers. The same customer would get a call from marketing to sell tickets and separate call from development asking for gifts.

The leaders realized that their model of marketing and development approach wasn't necessarily broken. After all, it had worked for well for years and customers pretty much accepted it as the status quo. Yet to realize their much bigger vision, they realized they would need to break their business model and create a new one.

This new model was based on a concept called "lifetime patron relationships". Patrons would be developed in an integrated manner over a lifetime, from their very first exposure to the organization, through their first purchase of a ticket, through their first gift, to the point where they became significant sponsors or philanthropic partners. Traditional marketing and development functions would be dissolved and a new integrated patron services department would form. This concept generated a huge amount of excitement among everyone - key patrons, board members, and the staff members.

The elusive holy grail of "buy-in" had been achieved!

Fast forward about sixty days after the new business model concept got the go-ahead from the board. Anxiety was rampant among the middle management team, conflicts were heating up, and productivity was taking a huge dip.

At the root of these issues was behavior. The team was struggling to move from concept to concrete. They understood the concept of the business model. It made sense emotionally and intellectually. Yet they were struggling to translate this into the concrete reality of new behavior. These were some of their questions:

• Who is actually going to do this work?
• How are they going to do it?
• What happens to the current work I'm responsible for?
• How do I learn how to do this new work when I am still responsible for old work?

Once some of these "day in the life" realities were defined, the anxiety level went way down and the team was able to focus on productive work. The more the leadership shifted to providing structure and support for this learning process, the faster they got the results they wanted.

No matter what business you are in, it all comes down to learning new behavior. Whether you are a 1-person or 100,000 person organization, getting this figured out is essential to achieving results. Learning new behavior includes you!

Notice the difference in mindset between "leading change" and "leading learning". In a sense, they have the same goal of getting to new behavior. But what is the difference between a leader who "drives change" and a leader who "leads learning"?

As the leader of your organization, how well are you helping your people learn the behaviors required for success? If you're currently "driving change" and it's not working, maybe it's time to learn to "lead learning" instead.